DIY: Are dad skills obsolete?

It’s true that a generation of young men have lost their DIY skills,
says our building columnist Jeff Howell. But it’s not their fathers’ fault
.

Listen with father: DIY skills learned from dad, such as carpentry, are in sharp decline partly because of advances in technology
Photo: ALAMY

By Jeff Howell

10:00AM GMT 10 Nov 2010

The Top Gear presenter James May has been asserting that modern men have lost their “dad skills”. The current generation of 20 to 30 year-olds, he says, are lacking the practical abilities their fathers and grandfathers had to carry out routine day-to-day home maintenance tasks such as putting up shelves and wiring plugs.

James May’s claim has certainly provoked a debate, as was no doubt his intention. He has his new BBC2 series Man Lab to promote, as well as his book How to Land an A330 Airbus and Other Skills for the Modern Man. May’s basic premise seems to be that in days of yore, when men were men, they were taught by their fathers to do practical physical stuff involving spanners, saws and gearboxes. Today’s young men, by comparison, he says, are wimps. Although, for me, he does not make it clear during which exact era the fathers are supposed to have stopped passing these vital skills on down the line.

I have to say that I like James May, and I find Man Lab very entertaining. If ever I find the need to defuse an unexploded bomb in my garden, I will have James to thank. I even once attempted to follow his instructions on how to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on the piano — and yes, James, my wife was duly impressed.

However, I have carried out a straw poll among building colleagues to see how much of their knowledge was imparted to them by their dads, and the results have been inconclusive. There are certainly some who were brought up at their fathers’ knees learning the basics of carpentry, plumbing or mastic asphalting, and working with Dad on building sites from the age of 10. But there are others whose dads were bank managers, civil servants or poets, and who drifted into the building game despite a lack of parental encouragement.

My own upbringing was somewhat between these two extremes. My father worked for the Post Office, starting as a telegraph boy at the age of 14 and progressing up through the ranks. He showed me how to wire a plug and screw two pieces of wood together, and he did all the painting and decorating in our family home. Like many men of his generation, he had learned the principles of home maintenance through necessity and poverty. He used his Second World War khaki battle dress as overalls, which I accepted as perfectly normal. But I couldn’t say he instructed me in any particular manual skills. Those came through doing woodwork and metalwork at school, and later when I took labouring jobs on building sites, which — I have to say — my parents did not approve of.

In defending James May’s assault on the lost dad skills, it must be said that there really is no parallel between the 1950s and 1960s, when I was brought up, and the situation today. The technology has changed beyond recognition.

When my dad bought his first car in 1965, he could follow the instructions in the handbook to remove and clean the spark plugs and reset the contact breaker gap — operations that he had to perform at regular intervals in order to get the thing started in the mornings. Today, when you open the bonnet of a car, you see a black plastic box with wires sticking out of it.

If the engine doesn’t start, you have to call a breakdown truck, which tows you to a place where they can plug a computer into the special socket that analyses which particular chunk of electronic circuitry needs replacing.

In my own life, I have always been accustomed to taking broken things apart in order to fix them. When the radio stops working, you take the back off, trace the broken or burned-out wire, strip off a bit of insulation, and reconnect it — hey presto! But a few weeks ago I tried the same trick with a malfunctioning toaster with somewhat different results. In the first place, you need special tools to get the thing apart, because modern electrical goods are not held together with normal cross-head screws. They have star-shaped or octagonal heads, or even special heads designed to prevent anyone ever unscrewing them once they have left the factory assembly line.

Once I had got past that particular barrier, I then found that the fault was in a failed electronic printed circuit board. A PCB — in a £15 Argos toaster! Two wasted hours, and the thing ends up in the wheelie bin, to go to landfill. Is there really any point attempting DIY repairs when the built-in obsolescence odds are stacked so heavily against you?

THE EMERGENCY DRILLS EVERY HOMEOWNER SHOULD KNOW

If you need to turn the water off at the mains

Mains water comes in through a 15mm (half-inch) copper or plastic pipe with a stop valve (which usually looks like the head of a tap, and works the same way, by screwing down clockwise to turn off the flow). It’s normally found under the kitchen sink, or sometimes in the cellar or garage.

If you smell gas

Turn off the main gas cock, which will be next to the gas meter. This is generally a quarter-turn valve, and turning it 90 degrees from horizontal to vertical should cut off the supply.

If the electricity cuts out

First check that it’s not a local area problem (by seeing if your neighbours’ lights have also gone out). If it’s just you, then check the consumer unit to see if any miniature circuit breakers (MCBs) or the Residual Current Device (RCD) have flipped to the “off” position.

Flipping either back to the “on” position will often do the trick, and reveal the dead light bulb that caused the problem in the first place.